Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia, 2018). Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation, second edition (2012).
The invention of Arab and Jewish 'questions' in Europe and their importation to late Ottoman societies ruptured mutually constitutive relationships that defined a distinctive civilizational pattern of coexistence. In interrogating the national(ist) identities that lie at the broken heart of todays' political imaginaries, this timely book points to a future beyond their separatist terms. -- A. Dirk Moses, author of <i>The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression</i> These thoughtful essays help us to understand how the destruction of ways of life (and of life itself) by pan-Arabism and Zionism-each claiming to assist the rebirth of a victimized people-and how the self-definition of 'a new Europe' after the Holocaust by repressing the memory of its murderous colonial history, has helped to shape our menacing present. This book is essential reading for all who wish to think productively about a human future beyond the nation-state, the modern collectivity whose ability to generate hatred toward 'enemies' is not unique but whose power to bring about catastrophe is. -- Talal Asad, author of <i>Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason</i> Original and thoughtfully articulated, this volume will become the first port of call to illuminate the relationship between the Jewish and Arab Questions: a must read for scholars of Palestine, Israel, Jewish and Palestinian studies, Zionism, and the modern European history of racism. -- Alon Confino, author of <i>A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide</i>